Scaffolding around our best hopes

What expectations around NBA rookies like Scottie Barnes say about our own flaws and fears.

His smile goes in intervals, it never actually quits. He bangs into the media room, ducks his head at the doorframe out of habit, does a wide and shy pan of the room where his grin, like a bird puffed on a power line at dawn, nestles into itself before stretching wide and lifting. He steps up onto the riser, barely an extension of his leg, and carefully folds himself down into the empty chair, placing his hands palm flat on the table and smoothing out the tablecloth as his smile travels the room, taking the eight or so of us in individually.

Hi Scottie, someone says.

His grin is cartwheeling then, careening around, How’s everybody doing? He asks.

And right then we’re all great. It would be impossible not to be.

The velocity of Scottie Barnes comes spurred from joy and burns into clean, pure propulsion. It’s such an ingrained and natural thing that when he’s been asked about it he’ll pause, occasionally seem a little puzzled, like he’s been asked for the reason his eyes are brown. How do you answer questions about yourself that seem as simultaneously strange but familiar, like your reflection in the mirror, to the point where you’re hardly registering the thing they’re about anymore.

His answers, when he gets asked about his infectious energy, his propensity to stand at the sideline and shout out encouragement so loudly that we can hear it in the media gondola way up in the rafters eye-level with the fluttering franchise banners, his knack for having already melted the entire locker room down to this bright, fused and giddy thing, are the inverse of the actions. Subdued, indistinct, still sure but with not a lot to say — I’d say it’s just me being me.

Expectations are at best a deep breath and at worst something that will suck the air from you. If you keep them loose, lofty but realistic, with discernible mile markers in mind, then expectations will be the big heaving breath from way down deep when your lungs are burning to quit. Make expectations too precise, but with a faraway glaze, then they’ll work to whittle you down.

The expectations for Barnes don’t yet have one bearing or the other, which is a sort of stolen reprieve. Borrowed time, stretching before the clock’s started, so many people tied up in the hope and the moment of him before it needs to mean anything.

It would be best if we stayed here. Made out to be comfortable in expectations, for Toronto, being as yet uncharted, because Barnes has been brought into a team that doesn’t require of him the same outsized promise of immediacy that come to hobble and lay an occasionally ruinous waste to the inaugural season of so many rookies. Barnes has been asked to play and deliver himself, as himself, a top pick that’s slipped the insurmountable assignment of an arbitrary number. We all seem to know what we expect of a top five, top ten draft pick, until pressed for specific differentiations between one and ten, until the season starts and those numbers get scrambled. The numbers, by assignment to actual performance over perceived value, don’t mean anything. The numbers should express the amount of work, the hours amounting into a young lifetime it took to get there, but then all those would-be rookies, those hopeful guys declaring each year who don’t make it, have put in time that they hope adds up to a low number that means high worth, willing the math of their lives to work backward.

Up in the gondola, Toronto’s first preseason game barely over, the hypothetical question comes from down the row about how long it might take for Barnes to lose his brightness. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the question, even in under a week.

Don’t even say that, I said. The hysteric flinch in my voice maybe softened by my smile at some point, but now, with masks, I can be as sharp as I want.

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Is it too simple to say that the thief of joy in most cases is expectation? I know the line about comparison also being a culprit, but bound up in that is still personal expectation. That you were due or destined something somebody else got.

It feels too plain for the deconstructing mess of our lives, but most absences of joy I can think of, in quick removal or painful, prolonged extraction, have a prompt shortcut back to a failing of expectation. From small (loss of keys, book, clothes), to middling (not getting a job), to large (my dad unable to say what my name was, losing language we weren’t sure he’d get back post-stroke), expectations led. In assigning value (Diana Taurasi is the greatest of all time), importance (prioritizing someone), belief (science, religion), expectations lead. The expectations are, respectively: I will find this, I will get this, this person will get well, my sight is reliable, this will be reciprocated, this will explain things.

The hitch is that there is no way to banish expectation. That even when we consciously try to keep them low, easy, fluid, the expectation is that it will work.

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The appeal of Barnes, in the long, arching days of summer since the draft and the scramble of the NBA preseason — but adjusting now, almost imperceptibly, with every passing game — is that there is no assignment yet of his expectation. As a player he’s in a Neverland of promise, like all rookies, but what draws us so close to him, the thrown wide-openness of his joy, is what simultaneously pushes toward impatience. To see if this joy, this wellspring of it, is finite. To prove whether he will be impervious to expectation or scrutiny and hold onto joy as a steady state.

It feels gross, when you frame it that way. Cowardly too. But maybe honest in knowing what we’re looking for, framed conveniently in the escapist stakes of basketball, is to see if he can withstand what we couldn’t.

I have no interest in fast forwarding ahead to see where and whether Barnes grows more serious, signalling to some, in the tangible loss of something, that he is more fit, more ready, more deserving to be there. That skill requires hardness as well as resolve.

I don’t ask of Barnes or his teammates to explain him as he is, I believe Barnes, in his perplexed honesty — I’d say it’s just me being me. I believe Fred VanVleet, too, when he says, He’s just a kid. Barnes can be both, can be much more. A vessel for his own joy, unburdened, and ours, trying its best not to unburden itself onto him.

Expectation doesn’t need to be entrapment, maybe more just the scaffolding around our best hopes, hysterical wishes, the things we want most but haven’t yet got the language or space to express. It hurts to be desirous of the world. To have those desires torched, denied, ignored, lay inside you unsaid, but what else do we do with life besides will it into a shape closest to the one we want? Feign or force hope until it sticks.